Commands using sudo (537)

What's this?

commandlinefu.com is the place to record those command-line gems that you return to again and again. That way others can gain from your CLI wisdom and you from theirs too. All commands can be commented on, discussed and voted up or down.

Share Your Commands


Check These Out

paste one file at a time instead of in parallel
paste one file at a time instead of in parallel

Turn white color to transparent for a series of png images
mogrify can be used like convert. The difference is that mogrify overwrites files: http://www.imagemagick.org/www/mogrify.html Of course, other source colors can be used as well.

Keep a copy of the raw Youtube FLV,MP4,etc stored in /tmp/
Certain Flash video players (e.g. Youtube) write their video streams to disk in /tmp/ , but the files are unlinked. i.e. the player creates the file and then immediately deletes the filename (unlinking files in this way makes it hard to find them, and/or ensures their cleanup if the browser or plugin should crash etc.) But as long as the flash plugin's process runs, a file descriptor remains in its /proc/ hierarchy, from which we (and the player) still have access to the file. The method above worked nicely for me when I had 50 tabs open with Youtube videos and didn't want to have to re-download them all with some tool.

Watch and cat the last file to enter a directory
Great for watching things like Maildir's or any other queue directory.

Record live sound in Vorbis (eg for bootlegs or to take audio notes)
This will record the capture channel of your soundcard, directly encoded in Ogg Vorbis, in stereo at quality 5 (I'm using this to record live jam sessions from my line input). You can choose which device to capture (eg. line input, microphone or PCM output) with $ alsamixer -V capture You can do the same thing and live encode in MP3 or FLAC if you wish, just check FLAC and LAME man pages.

This allows you to find a string on a set of files recursivly
The -r is for recursive, -F for fixed strings, --include='*.txt' identifies you want all txt files to be search any wildcard will apply, then the string you are looking for and the final * to ensure you go through all files and folders within the folder you execute it.

Remote execute command as sudoer via ssh
Example: remote install an application(wine). sshpass -p 'mypssword' ssh -t mysshloginname@192.168.1.22 "echo 'mypassword' | sudo -S apt-get install wine" Tested on Ubuntu.

Remove all old kernels
http://askubuntu.com/questions/89710/how-do-i-free-up-more-space-in-boot

Multi line grep using sed and specifying open/close tags
This line does not include your closing tag in the output.

Find usb device
I often use it to find recently added ou removed device, or using find in /dev, or anything similar. Just run the command, plug the device, and wait to see him and only him


Stay in the loop…

Follow the Tweets.

Every new command is wrapped in a tweet and posted to Twitter. Following the stream is a great way of staying abreast of the latest commands. For the more discerning, there are Twitter accounts for commands that get a minimum of 3 and 10 votes - that way only the great commands get tweeted.

» http://twitter.com/commandlinefu
» http://twitter.com/commandlinefu3
» http://twitter.com/commandlinefu10

Subscribe to the feeds.

Use your favourite RSS aggregator to stay in touch with the latest commands. There are feeds mirroring the 3 Twitter streams as well as for virtually every other subset (users, tags, functions,…):

Subscribe to the feed for: